Eragon was poorly received by both the box office and home consoles, but Vivendi Games did offer a glimmer of hope for the DS version. Eragon is an action/adventure game based on the motion picture, which in-turn was based on a best selling novel. The revolves around a young boy who is chosen to become a dragon rider and save the world from certain doom. The story is coherent enough to keep you going through the game. For the most part, Eragon will leave you most amazed at how far developers have pushed the graphics.

visuals

Eragon features a fluid and almost living world that you will likely travel through with great enthusiasm. Environments are both expansive and seamless, while towns and villages bustle with activity. Friendly characters donít look bad either; most differ in height, appearance, clothing and even hair. The enemies are just copies of each other, but they move smoothly and animate with great character.

But such great visual achievements come with some downfalls. Eragon, the boy you control throughout the game, has a lot of different animations that look the same. The environs also get repetitive, despite their large size.

audio

Eragon features no voice acting, which seems odd due to the high visual production values. Beyond that, the game features a strong track list of original tunes that go well with environments and certain dramatic situations. Some tracks will likely play more than once, but the game plays enough tunes to keep boredom at bay.

gameplay

Eragon hits both the high and low notes with its interesting gameplay. Essentially, Eragon is a standard action/adventure game with some role-playing elements. It may seem all too familiar to those who have played this type of game before, but Eragon tries to distinguish itself by implementing a spell-draw feature, where you have to draw certain spells on the touchscreen in order to cast them. This feature works fine, but comes off as time consuming. It probably would have been more satisfying to just assign spells to a face button. Spell casting is only one of the few fighting elements in the game.

Swordplay is probably the best and most used fighting element in Eragon. Most of the time you will simply be slashing away at monsters and trolls. The swordplay is intuitive and easily the most useful way to fight. For distance fighting, a bow and arrow lets you sit back and camp, but it's only marginally useful.

One annoying part of the game is navigating your dragon. The dragon is used to help clear obstacles or things along those lines, but the actual dragon riding mission has nothing to do with what needs to be done in the game. Oftentimes a cut scene will play showing a blocked path, and then you must navigate your dragon through blue hoops in order to clear the path. If the dragon doesn't fly through the hoops, it loses life, but there's no logical explanation how flying through blue hoops clears a path.

multiplayer

N/A

overall

Eragon will take about six to seven hours to beat with little reason to go back and do it all again. The game looks fantastic despite being a run-of-the-mill action/adventure game. Fans of the film or of this type of game may want to give Eragon a peek, otherwise it's best to wait for the new Zelda.